Loyalty to the King and Love for Country: Confucian Traditions, Western-Style Learning, and the Evolution of Early Modern Korean Education, 1895-1910

Abstract

The encounter between Confucianism and western learning is often portrayed as a confrontation between Confucianism, associated with passivity and hierarchy, and the western philosophical tradition, connected with independence and rationality. This bifurcating tendency is pronounced in the historiography of nineteenth-century Korean history, when Koreans established western-style schools and published modern textbooks. This article is neither a defense of Confucianism nor an endorsement of the western model, but a proposal to reexamine this dichotomization that is predominant in current scholarship and the assumption that the two were irreconcilable. A comparison of Korean readers demonstrates that the process of the incorporation of western ideas was less one of linear progress based on the displacement of Confucianism than an amalgamation of different ideas and values. Thus, from a more broadly defined Confucian framework emerged a new sense of civil duties that allowed intellectuals and government bureaucrats to discuss nationalism, citizenship, and the public sphere.